The gastrointestinal tract is responsible for an essential step in the digestive process, the reception of nutrition in the human body. An important element of the digestive process is peristalsis, the coordinated and self-regulated motor activity of the intestinal tract. Peristalsis is accomplished through a coordinated combination of electrical, chemical, neurological and hormonal mediation, as well as possibly other, as yet unknown, mechanisms.
Many diseases and maladies can affect the motor activity of the gastrointestinal tract, causing malfunction of the digestive process. Such diseases include diabetes mellitus, scieroderma, intestinal pseudo-obstruction, ileus, and gastroparesis.
Gastroparesis, for example, is a chronic gastric motility disorder in which there is delayed gastric emptying of solids and/or liquids. Symptoms of gastroparesis may range from early satiety and nausea in mild cases to chronic vomiting, dehydration, and nutritional compromise in severe cases. Diagnosis of gastroparesis is based on demonstration of delayed gastric emptying of a radio-labeled solid meal in the absence of mechanical obstruction. Gastroparesis may occur for a number of reasons. Approximately one third of patients with gastroparesis, however, have no identifiable underlying cause (often called idiopathic gastroparesis). Management of gastroparesis involves four areas: (1) prokinetic drugs, (2) antiemetic drugs, (3) nutritional support, and (4) surgical therapy (in a very small subset of patients.) Gastroparesis is often a chronic, relapsing condition; 80% of patients require maintenance antiemetic and prokinetic therapy and 20% require long-term nutritional supplementation. Other maladies such as tachygastria or bradygastria can also hinder coordinated muscular motor activity of the gastrointestinal tract, possibly resulting in either stasis or nausea or vomiting or a combination thereof.
The undesired effect of these conditions is a reduced ability or complete failure to efficiently propel intestinal contents down the digestive tract. This results in malassimilation of liquid or food by the absorbing mucosa of the intestinal tract. If this condition is not corrected, malnutrition or even starvation may occur. Moreover nausea or vomiting or both may also occur. Whereas some of these disease states can be corrected by medication or by simple surgery, in most cases treatment with drugs is not adequately effective, and surgery often has intolerable physiologic effects on the body.
Presently, however, there is no practically effective device or system to stimulator intelligently alter the muscular contractions of smooth muscle and the gastrointestinal tract in particular. Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and method to properly stimulate the gastrointestinal tract to thereby treat ineffective or absent electrical muscular activity of the gastrointestinal tract.